AT the office we develop relationships with voices, dozens of friendly, faceless souls from other companies with whom we constantly talk on the phone yet never meet in the flesh. But what if we suddenly found ourselves in a room with these people? And what if someone was feeding them alcohol?

That was the basic idea behind Tuesday’s “People-Who-You’ve-Spoken-to-on-the-Phone-But-Never-Met” party at the Velvet Lounge, the brainchild of five young publishing upstarts. “There are all these people I speak to every single day and have great relationships with,” explains Jane Mendle, a 23-year-old assistant at Nicholas Ellison Inc., “but I could sit next to them on the subway and I’d never know it.” Two months later, the invite list was at 350.

The festivities kicked off at 7 p.m., and by 7:15 the room is packed solid with fresh-faced twentysomethings. “The publishing leaders of tomorrow getting drunk today,” as co-organizer Brendan Cahill, 27, of Grove/Atlantic observed.

Indeed, after an initial awkwardness with guests furtively eyeing each others’ name tags over the rims of their cocktail glasses, the giddy, even frantic mingling begins.

“It’s great,” says Jake Kilisitch, an assistant editor at Scribners. “Agents aren’t talking only to agents, editors aren’t talking only to editors . . . I’d have to buy a hundred lunches to meet this many people, and my expense account just couldn’t handle it.”

Another organizer, Lisa Halliday, a 23-year-old contracts manager at the Wylie Agency, has just met her counterpart from Knopf, who she’s talked to nearly every day for the last five months. “We were assuring each other that we really are nice people,” laughs Halliday. “Now our dealings should be much smoother.”

But maybe business isn’t the only reason the partygoers show up. “There are no bosses here,” points out one fetching reveler. “In an industry where the women outnumber the men by about 5,000 to one, this is the highest concentration of men I’ve ever seen. Sure, I’m excited – I’m not a nun.”

Organizers, however, insist it’s not just a mating call. “If someone meets her husband here, she can thank us, but for us it’s completely networking,” says co-organizer Nicole Bond, 22, of the Maria Campbell Association.

But not everyone is happy. “All these people determined to network,” sneers one Wylie Agency pup, gazing at his fellow guests exchanging cards and hugging each other goodbye. “They’re already taking on this snide, ironic, corrosive predisposition because publishing is so cutthroat nowadays.” He lingers on watching the last of the crowd file out, mumbles something about the business, then leaves.

Maybe he needs a new line of work. The networking I saw was not the fierce, unholy networking of a Wall Street happy hour. The hand-shaking and card-trading that can make you wince had a certain laid-back sweetness to it, since nobody in the room had enough cachet to intimidate.

“We’re all just starting out,” explained Brendan Cahill. “We don’t want anything but to get to know each other.”